This text belongs to ‘Dossier Negro’, a newsletter inspired by the podcast of the same name, which Enrique Figueredo will send on Wednesdays on a biweekly basis. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
In criminal investigation, as in other areas of life, appearances can be deceiving. A case may look like an accidental death, but hide poisoning. A corpse on the tracks can make you think of suicide and actually be a terrible masked murder.
In 1999, we crime journalists had to travel to a small city in the province of Lleida: Cervera. A half-naked young woman had appeared on the railroad tracks. It was almost assumed that she had planted herself with the intention of removing herself from it, but the autopsy determined that she had been sexually assaulted with a bar and hit many times in the skull by her boyfriend. The new installment of Dossier Negro deals with this. One of the elements that the investigators then had was a video surveillance recording in which a female silhouette, presumably that of the victim, and another male figure, attributed to the murderer, could be seen walking together towards the tracks on the morning of the crime.
The filming of street and building security teams has provided invaluable documents for criminal investigations in recent decades. In La Vanguardia, we address in depth the theft in January 2020 of a peculiar purple diamond, valued at 14 million euros. To do this, we have, like the police in their day, high-quality recordings of the perpetrators of the abduction and its staging.
Sequence. In the case of Dani Alves, which has led to the footballer’s conviction for rape, the footage from the internal surveillance system of the nightclub where the sexual assault occurred has been key elements in the court’s assessment of the facts, as they allow confront each other’s versions with very weighty evidence.
A distant silhouette. Serial killer Volker Eckert was arrested thanks to a camera filming the silhouette of his heavy-duty vehicle from afar. The German truck driver was able to be located thanks to the efforts of the Mossos d’Esquadra who found the company for which he carried out the transport. He killed women across half of Europe.
About to kill. Recently, in Granada, an unknown person broke into the home of a pregnant woman who lived there with her three-year-old son and murdered them with a spear. The dogs did not bark or confront the intruder because he was not really an intruder. They played with him. He was the brother of the deceased. His entrance was recorded by the camera on the main façade.
Join the pieces. A young Canadian began publishing a series of videos online around 2010 in which he tortured and killed kittens. Finally, he ended up hanging the murder of a young woman. The criminal’s name is Luka Magnotta. A group of amateur cyber detectives chased him across the Internet. The story is collected in the documentary Don’t even touch the cats: a killer on the internet.